I’m comparing myself to adulthood. I have no dependents and own nothing of great value; no house, no car, no children, no spouse.
I look into the next five years: I don’t see a house or a car, a marriage or a family. But abstractly, in the future there are medical bills and tuitions, deaths, births?, [...]
Archive for the ‘Philly’ Category
For some reason I have chosen this moment.
Posted in Philly on 14 July 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Cat storage.
Posted in Philly, photo on 12 July 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Currently reading
Posted in Philly, books on 12 July 2009 | Leave a Comment »
I was inpsired by the men at the pier to attempt a hymn to the intelligence, peculiarity, beauty and horror of the modern work place and, not least, its extraordinary claim to be able to provide us, alongside love, with the principal source of life’s meaning.
-Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
This dude [...]
Brew
Posted in Philly on 12 July 2009 | Leave a Comment »
I gave in to the temptation to drink the first cup of coffee to drip through the machine. Now the rest of the pot will be weak, but every cup after is always chases the pleasure of that first sip anyway.
Trying to quit coffee after 2:30 because I read in Glamour magazine that it will [...]
Mother’s day.
Posted in Philly on 10 May 2009 | Leave a Comment »
My mom was hard to reach.
After trying the house phone, her cell, and my dad’s cell—for the second time—I thought maybe I wouldn’t bother. What a manufactured occasion anyway, and my mom hates the obligations of holidays.
Then I thought about how three years ago I was worried she’d die of cancer while I was [...]
On Twitter and literature
Posted in Philly on 15 March 2009 | Leave a Comment »
I had to stop working because it’s less than 12 hours until I have to be at work again. No good.
Neither was the text that I was editing.
Just kidding.
Jenne and I talked on the trolley last night about how hard it is to find time to be independently creative around the hours we [...]
Recipe for a Saturday
Posted in 208397, Philly on 1 February 2009 | 1 Comment »
1 hr of roll over and don’t get out of bed.
1 dash cat sleeping on backs of knees
10 cups coffee
1 part relief to have no obligations, 1 part nagging sense that you should be making more of your life, 1 part “it’s early and there are so many possibilities for this day.”
5 news related [...]
And,
Posted in 208397, Philly on 30 December 2008 | Leave a Comment »
In other news, one of my clients was on the plane that crashed in Denver.
Did you twitter from your blackberry, I asked?
Didn’t have one at the time, he said, but have an iPhone as a result.
And we’re 24 hours until the working class of Philadelphia don their blush and sequins. I can’t [...]
Wha?
Posted in 208397, Philly on 30 December 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Philadelphia NBC news just spent 45 seconds of airtime talking about the 4 Israelis killed by Hamas bombing and featured an Israeli scholar of some kind saying, and I paraphrase, “we cannot say Israel and Palestine are equally blamed, because they are not. There is one side that is targeting civilians and hiding behind [...]
@ the car lot, yeah
Posted in 208397, Philly on 29 December 2008 | Leave a Comment »
I just spent half my day trying to retrieve a rental car from Philadelphia’s impound lot #1. They were supposed to open at 2, then they amended it to 4, and then the cashier was an hour late to work.
It was farcical. Thousands of dollars stood in line, unable to retrieve our cars [...]
the life of a canvass director
Posted in 208397, Philly on 3 October 2008 | Leave a Comment »
I wish I had both the time and a computer to blog on more regularly. I am staying in the home of two Quakers in York, Pennsylvania while assistant directing in a voter registration canvass office. We are only being paid to register black people, so I have become a strange kind of racial profiler. [...]
Never say I’m not a masochist
Posted in 208397, Philly on 5 August 2008 | Leave a Comment »
So I basically told my boss I wasn’t interested in electoral work. I felt like a pussy, but I didn’t say yes just because I knew it would please other people for me to say it.
And then I actually talked to my peers about it.
Which I hadn’t before only because it’s hard to go to [...]
Do I stay or do I go, now?
Posted in Philly, tagged dread, election 2008, work on 28 July 2008 | 1 Comment »
I have a decision to make. In, like, two days, and I have been thinking about it for months without coming to any conclusion. That decision is whether or not to do electoral work this fall. Really, it is a small decision: What will I get paid to do during September and October of this [...]
Tuesday, Tuesday.
Posted in Philly on 15 July 2008 | 3 Comments »
It’s quarter to seven, I’m about to leave the office and I know there’s no one at home. I’ve shut a certain person out of my life, as I occasionally do, and everyone else is otherwise occupied or in California. There is no one for me to call. I feel glum and don’t want [...]
My life is not sustainable
Posted in 208397, Philly on 14 July 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Play the game “Consumer Consequences.”
It would take under under 3, but more than 2 earths in order for everyone on earth(s) to be able to live like me. Probably closer to three in the winter when I pay for heating oil. The biggest spike in my consumption is in the food and drink category. I [...]
A weekend with the family
Posted in Philly on 30 June 2008 | 2 Comments »
Sometimes I skulk around the facebook profiles of my friends who are still in Korea, read their wall messages to each other and feel a little something that I can’t pin down, but the accompanying thought is “Why am I so disconnected, now, completely from what was my life for a year?” And I almost [...]
OMG HOT
Posted in Philly on 8 June 2008 | 1 Comment »
I had to move to the downstairs couch to finish sleeping this morning. 7:45am and already in the 80s. Had really cracked out dreams that involved iced coffee, thunderstorms, and trying to run, which is always comical because, no matter the dream, when I run it’s like I’m trying to move through waist-high water. I [...]
my life as a potted plant lady
Posted in Philly on 18 May 2008 | 5 Comments »
I’m reading about how 27 percent of the food available for consumption in the United States ends up in a landfill and I vow on the spot to start a vermicompost bin on my back porch. Because I’ve got funky jars of roasted red peppers, frozen edamame from last summer, and expired vegan mayonnaise [...]
belatedly
Posted in 208397, Philly on 21 April 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The black cowboy riding into the sunset:
I’m a bit of a malcontent this afternoon.
Posted in Philly, thinking on 20 April 2008 | Leave a Comment »
I’m reading this article about this history of Bisphenol-A, its use in plastics, and its finally being identified as harmful to humans at doses that we are probably routinely exposed to when, say, microwaving leftovers in a Tupperware container.
What we’re now learning are developmental toxins have been an integral part of the celebrated progress of the [...]
Today, I read.
Posted in Philly, quoted on 19 April 2008 | Leave a Comment »
But the most serious mistake consists of taking the form for the content: defining all the various terrorists and terrorisms of our time, with their contrasting and sometimes conflicting objectives, by their actions alone. It would be rather as though one were to lump together the Italian Red Brigades, the German Baader-Meinhof gang, the Provisional [...]
the politics of rice
Posted in Philly, quoted on 19 April 2008 | Leave a Comment »
“Rice is a political commodity,” said Kwanchai Gomez, the executive director of the Thai Rice Foundation, a research center. “It’s not only an economic one.
Quoted in the International Herald Tribune.
Friday.
Posted in Philly, tagged work on 18 April 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Got back to the office after interviews around 8pm. Listened to my one message, read my twelve emails, decided to not to do anything about them until Monday. Hello, weekend. And I have frittered away most of the evening in front of the internet, watching clips of the Colbert Report episodes from their week in Philly. [...]
It’s my birthday.
Posted in Philly, tagged birthday on 30 March 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Today I am 24 years old and it is the first time since my 21st birthday that I have celebrated it in the U.S. Appropriately, Milie gave me a t-shirt entitled “Voyage of Discovery” in which a ship, waves, and palm trees rise in paper cutout off the pages of an open book. And also [...]
interviews
Posted in Philly, tagged work on 10 March 2008 | Leave a Comment »
I lost two and a half billable hours to interviews this afternoon. Annoying. It’s a bit my own fault since I listed a two hour window as available. I just never imagined they’d fill it. And then my five o’clock called at 5:30 and I had to say “I’m sorry, could you please call me [...]
Cat sitting Ms. Morgan.
Posted in Philly, tagged cat sitting on 9 March 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Is my string.
Is second dinner time?
I have been listening to the audiobook of Into Thin Air since I started cutting celery for chili around 4 o’clock this afternoon, except for about 15 minutes when a combination of absorption in the story, which is as much about being cold as it is about climbing a mountain, [...]
rent: epilogue
Posted in Philly on 9 March 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Our landlady received both the rent check that I lost, and the one that we sent to replace it, which means that either I actually mailed the thing and forgot, or a some well-meaning person found it on the ground and put it in a mailbox.
I wish I could know which. In one case [...]
rent
Posted in Philly on 3 March 2008 | 2 Comments »
This morning on my walk to work, I passed three unaccompanied minors, including one in a stroller being pushed by the oldest minor who might have been twelve-years-old.
At some point on said walk, I lost the envelope containing my rent, which I had foolishly stuck in a shallow blazer coat pocket. Because it was warm [...]
Death of a grocery store shopper
Posted in Philly, tagged Italian Market on 2 March 2008 | Leave a Comment »
On the blocks of ninth street between Washington and Christian, there is not a lot of sidewalk between the rutabagas, broccoli, mangoes, pears and squashes on the street side and the severed fish heads and sundries that line the other. At times, you have to navigate around the shoppers requesting their produce, people walking [...]
Internet videos: sometimes I wish I hadn’t looked.
Posted in Philly on 2 March 2008 | Leave a Comment »
I wait impatiently for vegetables to cook and browse the internets. I watch a video of a soldier throwing a puppy over a cliff.
Now, I’m a person who verges on calloused at the best of times, and I had a very visceral reaction to this minor act of wanton violence. A combination of the desire [...]
A window into my work culture
Posted in Philly, tagged 133+, work on 12 February 2008 | Leave a Comment »
An exchange of emails across two work days. N is a senior writer, R is, like, the boss.
Subject: Arriving Today
N wrote:
Environment Florida [one of my organizations, and therefore projects]
Arizona PIRG
+0+@||7 |33+ !!!one1!!eleven!!
Subject: Re: Arriving Today
I wrote:
I can’t decide if that |33+ is intended negatively,
positively, or with any communicative function at all.
Subject Re: Re: Arriving [...]
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